Here's my latest study for my new series. The setting is an old gold mine I found in the Sangre de Cristo mountains during my artist residency in the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. Didn't see any raccoons out there, but they'd no doubt like to explore if they could.
I'm in the process of gathering info to apply for another national park artist residency for this summer or fall. There are some good ones out there, but they are not especially well publicized. That helps my chances I guess so I don't mind doing some digging.
The gold mine study was done on a piece of flocked black paper and pastels that I inherited from the studio of Louise Marianetti. I hadn't worked on flocked paper before and am not sure the softness suits my work. It might be nice for portraits though, which is probably why she liked it.
Here's a better picture of the painting I just sent out to the Great Sand Dunes. I did make the one year deadline, but not by much. It's "in the mail" though, and should arrive at the park in a week.
The painting is of my favorite place in the park, the summit of the immense dunes on the east side of the dunefield, where they nestle against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in a more streamlined version of its peaks and valleys. It takes about an hour of exhausting climbing in the soft sand to get to the top but once up there, if you plan your route carefully, you can walk for a long distance across the broad summits and never see another person. Up there I found this little corpse of a Camel Cricket, an ironic sign of life half buried in the sand.
I've spent about a week and a half making boxes for my paintings and stashing them away in the rack (at right). To box some of the paintings I had to buy some even bigger pieces of corrugated at RISD Metcalf store. At 7 bucks a sheet it was kind of pricey, but I was informed that they were The-Only-People-Who-Had-Them. I remember, though, buying large sheets years ago from a warehouse in Pawtucket for considerably less, but I couldn't remember exactly where, and had no time, so I hauled 7 sheets across North Main Street and barely fit them in back of my pickup. Thank goodness it wasn't a windy day.
So my studio is getting a little bit more organized, and I no longer have to maneuver a narrow path like some hoarder with 25 cats. Not that I'm not guilty of the "but I might need it someday" syndrome , but I only have one cat, so that disqualifies me.
I've also been working on my Great Sand Dunes painting, there on the easel. I changed the composition, which put me back a few weeks, but it's a better painting for it.
With all my cleaning and moving I've made the acquaintance of dozens of spiders, including one "dead" spider that I found crushed between sheets of cardboard. So as not to damage the limp little corpse, I picked him up with tweezers and added him to my dead bug collection (I am NOT a hoarder—I just might need dead bugs someday). An hour later I noticed he wasn't so flat. If I didn't know he was dead, I'd say he was standing on his feet. After another hour passed, he seemed to move slightly, then suddenly started making a mad dash around his container. I let him go, far from the studio, since he looked like he had potential to be a biter. Unlike this elegant long legged beauty I found in the garden this morning.
Not sure I should post this pic, it's kind of embarrassing. But this was the state of my studio right now, BEFORE I retrieved over a dozen paintings from Roger Williams University on Tuesday. Somehow my old studio in Warren, though tiny in comparison to my "two-car garage" space, seems spacious when compared to all this clutter. Things have reached a critical stage, and a major gutting and purging of the studio is necessary, so I'm looking forward to organizing this weekend, the first days I've been able to have any studio time in WEEKS.
The first thing I have to do is find a way of fitting 10 pounds of paintings into a 5 pound rack, so to speak. I have no room to build another rack, so I bit the bullet and bought 30 sheets of big corrugated cardboard to use to create custom boxes for my paintings, which should save some space. Right now they're lucky to get a poorly-fitting recycled box scavanged from the Utrecht dumpster, with the accumulation of half a dozen painting titles and yards of ragged tape.
I'm keeping a corner in painting mode though, to keep working on my Great Sand Dunes Painting which is getting perilously close to using up its year's deadline. It will feel great to slap some paint on canvas for a change.
Lots of shuffling around of artwork is going in the next few weeks, which, if nothing else, justifies my driving a pickup instead of a Mini Cooper which I would LOVE.
Today I dropped off the above painting which just barely fit in the bed of the truck for the Art League of RI show at the RISD Museum. The show is not going to be in the big new gallery after all, (I thought that was too good to be true) but instead it will be in the OLD new gallery (the Farago wing), which is still pretty cool and a nice big space.
So I headed up Benefit St., and you know how it is when you are trying to get down really narrow street and cars are parked on the other side so you can barely get by if a car is coming the other way as it is, and then someone makes it even worse by just PARKING on the wrong side so you have to wait till traffic clears and then squeak by them. Well that was me. Not the one squeaking by. The obnoxious jerk who parked. But my painting was big, and a gusty thunderstorm was threatening, so...tough!
And it's now official. I have a painting in the RISD Museum.
Most of my other paintings will be coming home to my studio though. Monday I'll be taking down 5 church paintings from my art window . It sure will be easier to take down than to put up. A lot of the installation is made up of branches, shells and thorns and can go right into a composting bag, the canvas curtains can get wrinkled, and only the paintings need to be saved from demolition.
My show at RWU library comes down on the 22nd, which means I'm really going to run out of room in my storage racks. This will be a good time to reorganized and clean my entire studio, try to beat back the clutter sprawl and find space for all these damn paintings.
Luckily it's off to Colorado and the Great Sand Dunes for the painting I'm working on now. Now I just have to find good homes for the others...
I think I finished a painting today. I hope I finished a painting today. The reason being that it now only has a week to dry before being dropped off at the RISD Museum for the Art League of RI members show. If it seems like I've been working on this painting forever, its because I have. I even showed it once, in my show at the now defunct Gail Cahalan Gallery. But it wouldn't stay finished so back in the studio it went. If it's really finished when I look at it tomorrow, it will be the grand finale of the shoemaker series. After 4 years, it's time I moved on from the machines.
Besides, I'm really anxious to concentrate more on a few other paintings that are in the works, especially my painting from the Great Sand Dunes. I know I have a couple of months before my year's deadline is up, but I feel it's really inexcusable to have taken this long to send it. So if you're reading this, kindly Great Sand Dunes ranger, it will head west soon. Below is a snippet of the painting in progress.
I've also got several other paintings that were started ages ago. It's been so long since I really worked on them it will take some doing to reconnect, but I feel ready to follow this new direction to see where it leads.
So I'll give the big painting a good night's rest, and a signature tomorrow....I hope!
Even though the Providence area offers plenty of life drawing classes it's been years since I've drawn from the model. Not that I don't want to, but I never seemed to be able to commit the time. But I finally made it back into the circle of charcoal dust at Kate Huntington's Open Life Drawing. I've only gone twice so far, but it's a great group of very talented artists who are also very sociable, so it's a good time, despite me being so rusty that I begin to doubt I know how to draw at all.
My incentive for finally getting my butt down on the drawing horse was thoughts of beginning a good-sized oil painting of sand dunes to send to Great Sand Dunes National Park in return for my residency last year. While I was out there I kept being struck by how much the curves of the dunes reminded me of the human body, so since I can't sit in the dunes these days, I'll work from the figure and think about how the human body reminds me of the dunes.
The weather is warming up here, low 40s and sunny, so the studio will heat up a lot faster. I'm hearing birds all of a sudden too. In the fall they fall silent one by one so I don't think I really notice... but just one little chirp this time of year and I remember what I've been missing. It's only mid-February though, so I'd better not get too used to it.
I was curious about the square UPS box on my porch since I didn't remember ordering anything. I opened it to find this really cool mug, made for me personally by the second Artist-in-Residence at Great Sand Dunes National Park, Sally Gierke.
We met when she took my drawing class on the dunes, then we bunked together in the Park apartment on my last night. I was the first time I overlapped with another Artist in Residence, and it was fun comparing notes, as she had also been Artist in Residence in Margo-Gelb on Cape Cod National Seashore. I guess that makes us Dune Buddies.
I spent my New Year's Eve sitting in front of the fire drinking a little champagne and reading over my last year of blogging. My memory is notoriously bad, so being able to review the year this way makes me glad to have posted over the last 12 months, even if no one was to read it. But I've also made some good connections along the way, which makes me happy that some people have read it, so if you're reading my blog now...thank you and Happy New Year!
I have to say, for all the dissing of 2009 I've heard, it was not a bad year for me, and for that I'm grateful. Even though I often fantasize about ditching the day job, I survived two rounds of layoffs and I know, intellectually, it's a good thing. Unemployment would not mean more time in the studio, it would mean more time on interviews. If I was lucky enough to find another job, would probably mean longer hours for less pay. So I guess I'm glad I kept my job.
More importantly though, those I care about are doing ok. Although I would wish better health for some, we are all still here, still supporting ourselves and still getting along.
The most disappointing thing this year has been in my work. After three or four years of intense work on my last series, I haven't produced much substantial since my show at the end of 2008. I have been thinking a lot, but haven't found the same kind of focus as I had with my Shoemaker Series yet. I do have some ideas floating around, and found a special dune-ish inspiration last summer, so paintings will follow...
So where did all the time go? Let's see...
In January I went to classes at the Museum of Natural History in Roger William's Park called "Drawing from the Collection" and learned to love taxidermy. I focused on owls, and it gave me some ideas about incorporating these little spirits into my work. It was also very cheering (if freezing) to hop on an overnight bus to attend the inauguration in Washington. It was a great experience to feel so hopeful about the shift in direction our country chose, and although everything is far from wonderful, I still feel hopeful to have someone leading this country who can think in more than one dimension. I had washed my hands of the judgment of the American Public, so had to promptly unwash them.
My friend Mary Grady was the one who got me out into January's cold on those adventures. Her's usually take place up in the sky, so check out her site if you like all things aviation.
In February I said goodbye to my 1989 Toyota pickup. You would think swapping it for a new 2009 version would be exciting but I still feel a pang when I think about it and wonder if I did the right thing. The new truck is much smoother, but bigger and not nearly as friendly. But I gave my old truck to my college-age niece, so I get to take it for a spin once in a while. I have to admit I'm amazed at how stiff, pokey and noisy it rides now that I'm used to the other. But it served me well for 20 years and delivered a lot of paintings.
In March I found out that one of the national park artist residencies I had applied for had accepted me. In fact, I was to be the first AIR at Great Dunes National Park. A few weeks later, I got a phone call which told me that my name was chosen in a lottery to stay in dune shack on Cape Cod.
Quite a coincidence, and it was nice to be able to anticipate hiking barefoot through the dunes to get me through the blustery chill of March.
As excited as I was about planning my next residency, I still owed Mesa Verde a painting from my 2008 residency there. I finished it in June, just over the year deadline. Those at the park were very patient and resisted showing up at my studio door with their flat rimmed ranger hats and crisp khaki uniforms to seize what I owed them. I'm glad they like it when it finally arrived.
In August, after a little angst about whether I could get the time off work, and keeping a nervous eye on Hurricane Bill which was charging up the coast, I was dropped off at the dune shack Thalassa and spent an idyllic week there, hiking over the dunes and along the shore, watching the huge waves kicked up by the hurricane, drawing, swimming and entertaining a few guests.
I hardly had time to shake the sand out of my shoes before heading out to Colorado and Great Sand Dunes National Park in September. The dunes were much higher there, but worth the climbing. I'm still working on posting my journal, but the first two installments can be found here.
The rest of the fall was spent in getting my application out for Denali National Park (rejected!) and happily sorting through some exhibition opportunities which have come my way. I drop off the paintings for the first one, at Bert Gallery in Providence, tomorrow and will have more details soon.
It will be nice to move some of my paintings out of the cold studio and into nice warm gallery space. And it will be nice to move me into the cold studio to make more...
I took a l little trip to NYC Sunday to walk around and see the Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim. It was fun watching the landscape speed by from the train window again. It made me think maybe I hadn't quite finished painting the northeast corridor landscape. The streets of NYC were freezing when we got there, this time of year the sun doesn't get high enough in the sky to be able to penetrate the valleys between the buildings. The wind, however, manages to race through and chill us to the bone. Once we got to Central Park though, the sun shone on the snow dusted landscape and the wind dispersed, so we decided it was nice enough to continue our walk of the 54 blocks to 88th street.
Kandinsky was great, the Guggenheim is a perfect place to see it. It looked like a big Kandinsky wedding cake, turned inside out.
We are lucky that our internal clocks are still on Eastern Standard Time, since we're awake by 5:30 to look out and see the dunes glowing pure white like bone china, the mountains dark behind them. Realizing that this phenomenon will not survive the rising sun we grab our cameras and head down to the road to get an unobstructed view. The sun is already peeking over the Sangre de Cristos and lighting the valley, and as it creeps toward the western end of the dunes the cold white turns to frosty ochre. The mountain's shadow contracts and the highest dunes reflect the pale morning sun with rosy glow.
It's chilly so we keep moving while we watch and I turn to the east to scan the plains. A few hundred yards off I see a pair of elk, shy of us despite their distance.
We stay until the dunes are almost fully lit then return to the apartment for breakfast before heading down to the Visitor's Center to check the forecast. It predicts a chilly, windy day, so a hike to Revelation Point seems like a good way to take advantage of cool climbing temperatures without the danger of sandblasting. CONTINUE READING....
I was hoping to have my next installment of my Great Dunes journal by the next time I posted, and it's close, but not done yet. Sorry to keep you in suspense (as you say—oh, there's more?) But, if they're not literary masterpieces, it's still good for me to labor over them. I did write down my impressions every day while out there, but in trying to make something of it, and going over it again and again, it really helps me sort out the experience and remember my residencies more richly.
I got an email this week from the latest residency I've applied for — Denali National Park— but was afraid to click on it, being at work and all, and not wanting to switch my mood from stupefaction to disappointment. But it was just a notification that I'll hear in the next few weeks, so there's still hope!
Meanwhile I've been working on a video for my upcoming show at the Bert Gallery in January. They've been filming interviews with the artists to go along with their recent shows, and the thought of having to go on about my work in front of a camera made me immediately volunteer to work with my husband (a filmmaker) to come up with a little video that hopefully will be more interesting than my talking head. So we returned to the shoemaker's shop and took some shots, and will film in my studio, and perhaps I can edit it together in something approaching a coherent piece.
Some of the pressure is off for now though. I found out I misunderstood about the Providence Art Window gig, the letter asked if I COULD install by December, it didn't say I would be SCHEDULED to install in December. So it's still on, but sometime in the future...and out of my head for now, where it's safer.
I am in a holiday show at Imago gallery in Warren though. I submitted these 3 little paintings of the Badlands National Park, so stop by their lovely new gallery if you get a chance. My pieces are recession priced...such a bargain! Warren was hopping last weekend when I went, too. Granted it was the lighting festival, but it really is getting to be a very arty scene there, and it will look so festive with the colored (not snooty white) lights strung across Main St.
I'm finally getting around to posting the first part of my artist in residence journal. More is coming soon, just as soon as I can finish typing it out and adding some photos. See the first two days here...
GREAT SAND DUNES NATIONAL PARK Sunday, Sept. 20
By the time we make our way through the mountains and into the enormous San Luis Valley there is no light left in the sky or on the road. Our headlights cut through the night to reveal only 50 feet of dead-straight asphalt, a few deer in the scrub by the side of the road, and the occasional kangaroo rat hopping to safety just in front of our tires. CONTINUE READING...
Here's a few more sketches from Great Sand Dunes National Park that I just got around to scanning in. These are postcard sized and were done out in the dunes. If you look close at the larger versions you might still be able to see some grains of sand stuck to the paint.
Since I came back from Colorado it seems the seasons are changing like flip cards. The light is now dim on my morning commute and dark on my way home—I'm remembering how that can interfere with painting progress sometimes. For example, I need to get down to the beach to get some shoreline reference photos for a small painting I'm doing. That should be easy, since I live only a block and a half from the beach, but since I'm in the city during all available daylight hours, it will have to wait until the weekend. It's also hard to think of firing up the studio when I pull into the driveway and see it standing there cold and dark, but I'll just have to adjust..and get back to work!
Well, my Denali application is, not "in-the-mail", but in the internet ether I guess. Now I just have to wait an endless amount of time to hear if I got this latest artist residency. I never really understand why it takes so long, sometimes months, to process the applications. Can't they just have a meeting, like, the week after the deadline and pick someone? Then just email, or mail, their decision the next week? That's only two weeks, but I must be missing something about the process, so I'll be patient...
These are three of the six paintings I needed for my application (click on them to view larger), all from my Great Sand Dunes National Park residency. Two of them are of Medano Creek, a very shallow stream of water which runs from the mountains and along the base of the dunes. In late September, when I was there, it had retreated to the east and was rather lazily pushing forward only to be absorbed into the dry sand of the wide creek bed, which gives a clue to how large Medano gets in spring and early summer. I wish I'd had the chance to take an entire day to hike up it further, but time ran out on me.
I'm still trying to pull some Great Sand Dunes art and writing together to post, but have been working all week on finishing a few small paintings for my Denali application, which is due this weekend.
It helps that I can submit my application electronically. Now I can work up to the last minute without taking slides, rushing the film to one of the few one-day slide processing labs, re-taking the slides because they came out too-blue, too-yellow, too-dark, too light, too-skewed, or too-glarey, developing them again, masking them with silver tape, making tiny little labels, putting them in a slidesheet, carefully printing my application, putting them all in a 9x12 envelope with a return 9x12 inside, going to the post office to get it weighed, putting return postage on the inside envelope, and FINALLY, getting it in the mail, hopefully to be delivered by the deadline date.
The Denali application uses a website called CAFE. It's a bit exact about how you need to format your digital images, but once you submit one set for an application, it keeps them on file so you can reuse them to apply for other opportunities. The only downside is that they don't have too many listings yet. It's a great idea though, so I hope it catches on.
So, until I get caught up and scan in some new dune images, I'll just post a "lunch sketch" from a few years ago.
Here's another little sketch (4"x6") I made out in the Great Dunes. I'm working on six larger oils, trying to finish them in time to use a few in my application for an artist residency in Denali National Park in Alaska. Every year for the past 5 years or so I've applied for this one, every year I'm told I made the "short list" and to try again. So I do. Wish me luck this time!
• • •
In preparation for my upcoming exhibit at the Bert Gallery I'm updating the Shoemaker section of my website to enlarge the images and correct some loading issues. So far I've revamped the painting slideshow, see the NEW! AND IMPROVED! version HERE.
This is a dragonfly that I found in the sand at the top of the Great Sand Dunes. Right now I think I know how he feels. Except I'm not dead. Definitely half buried though — but in a good way. I just found out that I'm going to have two exhibits in the next few months. This after pretty much no activity for almost a year. So I'm psyched about it, but have to keep on top of things so I don't get into a last minute panic.
Luckily all the paintings are done, dry and framed. That's the main thing I can check off my list.
I'm going to show the Shoemaker paintings at the Bert Gallery in January-February. I've shown with Cathy Bert several times and it's always a great experience. It's such a pleasure working with a real professional. I just wish she had a bigger space, but I'm happy that she says we can fit 9 paintings into her back gallery.
The other exhibit will be an installation of my Church paintings in a storefront or window space Downtown Providence. It's part of Providence Art Windows, which has been a very successful project to utilize vacant space downtown and a great way to have my work seen by people who don't usually visit galleries.
I'm also working on half a dozen other projects and deadlines, in addition to the old day-job, that I won't bore you with, but WILL use as an excuse for not posting my Great Sand Dunes journal and artwork yet. But I will. Soon.
Until then, here's a little watercolor I did out in the dunes...
Here are a couple of photos of the charcoal sketching class I gave as part of my artist residency at Great Sand Dunes National Park. (more added to my Great Dunes slideshow) I had 10 students and they were all great and fun to work with. Some traveled 2 hours or more to attend! It must be a western thing, back east we gripe if we have to drive 20 minutes. Of course, we have annoying things like red lights, stop signs and traffic jams, not found in the San Luis Valley. The scenery there is awfully cool too. Makes me want to go for a drive now...west!
I've sorted through my two weeks of photos from the Great Sand Dunes and pulled out the best here - Great Sand Dunes photos on Flickr. A lot of them didn't come out that well. I think the light was just too strong, and I'm not enough of a photographer to compensate. But I have what I need for reference, and I actually think it's better if the photos are weak. That way I bring more of myself to the paintings, and use the impressions in my head instead of what I see in a beautiful photograph. I dreamed of climbing dunes for 3 nights after I got back, so I think the impressions are there!
I'll post photos from my charcoal sketch class soon.
